Movie Review: Upstream Color

Back in 2004, a young man named Shane Carruth created Primer, a groundbreaking science fiction film that dealt with a storage unit and time travel. The film was made for an unbelievable $7000, a thousandth the budget of most science fiction films made in Hollywood and it was a thousand times smarter, more complicated and well-staged than most science fiction films made in Hollywood. It wowed genre fans and quickly became a cult classic. Carruth’s followers waited patiently for his follow up ‘A Topiary’, and were devastated when that project fell through. The man went off radar, slipped away into oblivion and it seemed like he’d disappeared for good. It’s been nine years since Primer, Carruth is back, with a sci fi story that is even more complex, engrossing, innovative and thought provoking than his previous effort. And just like his first film, Upstream Color crushes the mainstream competition from Hollywood.

There have been plenty of movies where the filmmaker explores the post Old Monk questions of man’s free will and the musty feeling of a higher power controlling humans. Carruth makes the question ‘Are we who we think we are’ outdated by introducing an imaginative query: What if a man and a woman are drawn together because they were entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism? Wrapping your head around that plot immediately becomes a challenge as Carruth starts spinning your head right from the opening scene, inviting us to invest our grey cells into the oblique imagery on screen. This is neither a film that you can sit back and consume with a bucket of popcorn, nor is it a film that you can figure out by constantly hitting rewind. This is an intricate stream of arthouse storytelling that can be understood and appreciated only if you’re willing to go with the flow, rather than hitting pause and looking for hidden meaning and coherence in the frames.

The whole film is an array of mostly dialogue less scenes with electronic music montages, Carruth is clearly derivative of Terrence Malick’s work, where you’re required to breathe in and experience the film. Making sense of Primer was arduous given the insanely technical dialogue driven nature of the film, Upstream Color is just as labyrinthine but is more pleasurable to decode thanks to Carruth’s technical proficiency and his ability to make the narrative foggy without obfuscating the story or meandering into self-indulgence. There is no poetic voiceover or shots of foliage, Carruth is able to convey some insightful philosophy on why humans long for togetherness by sticking with his characters. The bizarre imagery, elliptical narrative and overall weirdness may turn off less patient viewers who would call it needlessly complicated, but there was no other visual or aural way Carruth could communicate the film’s ideology about love and inseparability across to the viewer. The genius of the film is in fact the way Carruth shrouds the relatively simple plot with an aesthetic layer that makes it seem like it is more byzantine than it actually is. Like a magic trick, Carruth cleverly shifts our attention by making us look at things that he wants us to see, the trick is to be able to embrace the convolution on screen rather than try to fight it.

Most importantly, Carruth doesn’t bombard the viewer with lectures on transcendence, spirituality and the human condition – the themes are all there, but are coated around the science fiction mystery thriller that the film ultimately is. There are no conventional Hollywood style cheap thrills but the astounding sound design, the soundtrack, the cinematography, the editing (all done by Carruth) exudes a higher order of filmmaking. Take Upstream Color as a thriller and you get terrorists, a conspiracy, a serial killer and bizarre insects. Take it as a love story and it’s a beautiful analogy of two people drawn together because they can relate to each other’s emotional scars. Take it as a looking glass that allows you to peer into the glorious depths of Shane Carruth’s mind, and hope that it doesn’t take him nine more years to make his next film.

(First published in DNA)

Movie Review: The Great Gatsby

If it weren’t for Baz Luhrmann’s name attached to the credits, it would seem like The Great Gatsby is Subhash Ghai’s best film in years. The only thing missing in it is a sequence that has Leonardo DiCaprio singing ‘Meri Mehbooba’ for Mahima Chaudhry.

The 1974 Robert Redford version of The Great Gatsby was a dull bore, and it seemed like a good idea when Baz Luhrmann announced his plans to make his own version, given his proclivity for over the top imagery. His signature excessive style is very much present here yet the narrative is as hollow and intrinsically bankrupt as most of the characters in the film. Like his Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge Luhrmann uses the stylistic touch of remixed modern hip hop and pop music in a period setting but to very choppy effect. Like a lovechild of a Ghai and a SL Bhansali product everything here is overwrought and grand, overtly melodramatic at every beat, blaringly extravagant at every turn. It’s the America of the roaring twenties shown through Luhrmann’s kaleidoscope of gluttony, which works on some levels but not all of them.

At the center of this sea of overindulgence is the suave Mr DiCaprio, whose introduction  twenty minutes into the film is as showy and goofy as it can possibly get, his face jutting into the 3D camera, grinning a foot away from our glasses clad faces. He wears pink clothes, like Shahrukh Khan in Don, has a charming swagger with just the shade of some sort of insecurity that he tries to mask. Leo is just right for the role, an irresistible gentleman in the sun who hides a secret in the dark and longs for a woman who may never be his. He has played similar characters in the past and he’s at the top of his game here. The problems arise from the people surrounding him, beginning from Tobey Maguire whose curiously adolescent role delivers droning voiceovers to explain each and every character development, as if the audience is too stupid to keep up and figure things out on their own. The advantage of great movies is they don’t need to explain their characters and their motivations, only a badly made film needs a voiceover.

With the constant reliance on music, sound cues and special effects, Luhrmann forgets the most important aspect – the characters. It is true that the characters in the story are shallow and empty but that point can’t be driven by shallow and empty performances. Apart from Leo’s constantly involving and tragic Gatsby and Joel Edgerton’s rich chauvinistic pig the characters are simply high school level incompetent. There’s Daisy, the object of Gatsby’s desire played by Carrey Mulligan who utterly fails to effectively convey the dual nature of her character. She is cloyingly unconvincing as the woman torn between an unhappy but practical married life and a dreamlike forbidden love. Every time Mulligan stumbles to add any emotion to a scene, Luhrmann tries to balance things out by adding music, resulting in a superficial mess. He also adds cheap CGI to romanticize the imagery but it just cheapens the film further. The fact that the filmmakers chose to screen this story in 3D only mirrors the rich, slimy, callous businessmen from the film who would cheat the public into squeezing more money from them. Moreover, unlike Moulin Rouge, the music doesn’t work either, except for the song used in the end credits which actually fits with the mood of the story. The music is neither colorful the way Bollywood does it nor is it coherent like in good Hollywood musicals. In fact it isn’t the choice of the music as much as it is the way it is awkwardly jammed into the visuals that hurts the narrative. The silver lining in this high-strung surfeit muddle is Amitabh Bachchan who makes a tiny cameo but thankfully manages to avoid hurling the reputation of Indian cinema in the gutter. 

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: Epic

The creators of Ice Age and Rio aim to deliver their biggest film ever and on the visual front it delivers the goods in a tremendous way. Story wise though, Epic does a huge belly flop when it attempts to live up to its name.  

Director Chris Wedge, who made the first Ice Age film and the voice of Scrat seems to be chasing the illusive box office acorn because everything about Epic has the musty whiff of stale storytelling. The film chronicles a teenager (Amanda Seyfried) who moves in with her estranged mad scientist dad (Jason Sudeikis) after the death of her mother. The dad has ruined his career by being obsessed with searching for a colony of fairy-like creatures in the nearby woods. The kid’s disappointment in her dad quickly gives way when she walks into the forest and is shrunken down to size after being handed a task to help save the people of the woods. It could all be a major psychological breakdown but seeing as this is a kids’ film we’re forced to believe the legitimacy of the rabbit hole.

Tiny warriors, magical forests, fairy queens, evil toads, a young girl changing fate and destiny are not exactly new concepts and Epic falls hard once we know that there isn’t anything new coming our way. Once the protagonist sets off on her journey to save the forest from doom you’ll be ticking off a list of clichés the story relies on. The filmmakers make no effort to establish why the evil Boggans want to destroy the forest – they’re simply painted black and we’re expected to accept the evilness of that color. Despite a fairly likable protagonist Epic dwindles every time the camera cuts to the bland and unfunny supporting characters - even the generally hilarious Aziz Ansari does the same shtick from Parks and Recreation as a slug who constantly hits on the girl. The only fun sequences are the ones shot from the perspective of the tiny men who see the humans as huge, slow, lumbering idiots. The 3D does more harm than good in an already problematic story – the exquisite shots of the jungle foliage and its many colors are once again dimmed and blurred down by the 3D conversion. Ultimately Epic doesn’t work as an adventure and it doesn’t work as a comedy, what it does is it succeeds in making us hate musician turned voice actor Pitbull even more than usual. 

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

There is no other way to say it – The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a clunky, undercooked hot mess that absolutely wastes its culturally relevant subject and favors heavy handed moralistic arm twisting over nuance and subtlety. Quite frustrating, seeing as the gaffes in the film overshadow its most important plus point – a great performance from its lead Riz Ahmed.

Director Mira Nair takes every word of every page of the 2007 book of the same name and makes it as superficial and melodramatic as humanly possible. While the book was known for its open ending that left the true nature of its protagonist ambiguous, the film version pretty much milks the tempest in the teapot. Riz Ahmed stars as Changez, a Pakistani man who leaves his family behind to become a top dog at Wall Street but is disillusioned by the post 9/11 atmosphere in America. He is routinely selected for random strip searches at airports and harassed by cops on the street simply for being brown. His unstable American girlfriend first puts up some offensive art gallery about his Pakistani heritage and then leaves him.

Until this point, it is fairly easy to sympathize with Changez, but then Nair takes an unintentionally hilarious turn by drawing parallels between the ideals of Wall Street and religious extremists. The cops that arrest Changez are straight out of a B-movie, almost parodying the characters they play. There are dozens and dozens of closeups of Changez’s face in turmoil but Nair never goes beyond the surface level obvious issues, let alone delving into the religious fervor of fundamentalism. The film is framed as a flashback, where Changez is narrating his story to a CIA agent posing as a writer while the CIA monitors the meeting, ready to spray bullets if things go bad – a plot device that is incredibly crummy and illogical and exists sorely to render the illusion of the film being a thriller. The agent (flatly played by Liev Schreiber) is aware of Changez’s extremist views and Changez’s story is meant to justify his actions, but Nair throws in a sappy curveball in the end that negates the whole point of the interview. Add to that the horrible performances from Kate Hudson as the crackpot girlfriend and Meesha Shafi as Changez’s sister who only wants ‘a loft in SoHo, a weekend in the Hamptons and big, American boobs’ to settle down after marriage. Moreover, every subsequent scene has different tone, lighting and music, robbing the film of any semblance of a flow.

The real problem though, is the clumsy establishment of Changez’s tipping point where he finally leaves America and returns to Pakistan – he has a realization when on a Turkey business trip a writer shows him his father’s book of poetry and says that foreign corporations are eating into cultures and devaluing humanity. Changez’s big transformation has the nuance and effectiveness of Hrithik Roshan in ZNMD climbing out of the sea and crying. Riz Ahmed is a fine actor but it’s about time he moved on to different roles – he has played the racially discriminated Muslim in The Road to Guantanamo and even parodied the same in the hilarious Four Lions, both of which are vastly superior to this film.

(First published in MiD Day)